Keep an eye out for jobs in mobile news, product development
Just days after attending a panel discussion on mobile advertising, I spotted a blog post on Poynter about news organizations hiring people to develop strategy for delivering news on mobile devices. Apparently, the Orlando Sentinel, CNN.com and Philly.com have each dedicated resources to paying attention to their presence on cell phones – particularly smartphones like the iPhone – with an eye toward capturing more traffic and eventually ad revenue.
And if you know how to develop mobile apps, well… let’s just say you’ve got full employment for the foreseeable future. Gannett and News Corp. are looking for mobile app developers, while The Washington Post is searching for someone with the right chops to be their new mobile product manager.
The folks in the Poynter blog post have some interesting points about the mobile platform. For years now, newspaper editors have talked about how their journalism is “platform agnostic,” which means they don’t define themselves by how they distribute their content. The leading news organizations have been cultivating their skill at leveraging the unique strengths of those platforms on big breaking news stories. The web story has immediacy, virtually infinite flexibility for updates and crowdsourcing, and viral distribution. Print has the weight of that first draft of history, lovingly composed page designs, and longer, in-depth reportage for those who make the time to appreciate it.
I love this quote:
“Having a mobile manager has helped everyone realize how we have to treat content differently on the platform,” said Roger Simmons, director of content/East Coast for Tribune Interactive. “I love the fact that at any given time the top stories on the newspaper front page, website and mobile site might all be different — all tailored to the needs and expectations of our readers.”
The next platform – mobile – offers newspapers a second chance to avoid the mistake they made with the web, according to Ken Doctor, the author of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. The prevailing norm on mobile is one of paying for useful content, unlike the web browser.
“For local newspapers, this is the biggest opportunity in a decade for a do-over,” Doctor said at the ASNE convention this year.
And just the other day, the chief marketing officer of Unilever told an audience at the International Advertising Festival that the Number 2 advertiser worldwide plans to double spending on digital marketing this year. The company spent only 4 percent of its $864 million in measured media last year on Internet spending, according to an article in Advertising Age. But the company is rapidly moving to shift its marketing spend to be proportionate to the amount of time people spend with digital media.
So you do the math: How much time do you spend consuming content on your television? at your PC? on your iPhone?
